Copyright

I have some questions for you microtuners.

I do know that laws differ from country to country as to copyright rules and regulations, but what I need to know is what the rules are for DRASTICALLY altering someone else's composition by mangleing and microtuneing it.

In SCALA, you see, I played around with the retune MIDI file feature as explained to my by Mr.Warren Burt, with other's 12ET MIDI files which I had mangled severly, and in some cases, I had even gone as far as to mangle the resultant *.wavs.

Look, a QALITIVE analysis as done by a panel of "experts", might have these "experts" rate the similarity of two peices, a mangled and derived microtonal peice as to compared with the origional 12ET peice, on a scale of 1 to 1000, with 1000 being EXACTLY the same, 0 being TOTALLY different and 500 being somewhat similar.

This is quite easily done and it is pretty straightfoward, but it IS subject to personal interpretation and opinion.

However, what is really, REALLY diffilult, and impractical is a logical, QUANTITIVE formal, rigorous, logical, algorithmic set of rules for derermineing the similarity of two peices, between the origional and the mangled-and-microtuned.

Can you please suggest ideas as to how this might be done?

I do not want to break any laws and to get into trouble by distributeing material which breaks copyright laws in whatever country, as it is not fair on the origional artist, and it is also illegal.

I thought the you could take all the samples of each, and analyse them by percentage of 0's, 1's, 00's, 01's, 10's, 11's, and then by tripels (0/1)*3 (8 configurations), (0/1)*4 (16 configurations)....(0/1)*n (2^n configurations).

This is impractical to do, as the amount of percentages calculations generated would be VAST, but assumedly each song when treated this was would have it's own signature of proportion 0's and 1's configuration content.

So, please tell me, how different does a mangled and microtuned peice have to be?

What you have to realize is that microtonal music is obsecure, and I do not know if there are even any laws which govern what I have experimented with.

What can you all tell me about what you know about rules for copyright with derived works?

---Sarn.

__________________________________________________________________________________
Yahoo!7: Catch-up on your favourite Channel 7 TV shows easily, legally, and for free at PLUS7. www.tv.yahoo.com.au/plus7

Just a small question: is there any special reason why you want to use material of somebody else and not to compose your own from zero? You can use all that derivative effort on your own material. In my opinion it's more easy to make new piece than try to derive something from the finished one.

There could be only few artistic reasons and ways how to use foreign material: quotation, collage, traditional variation or some kind or structural processing of musical or audio elements - rearranging, re-instrumentation, re-voicing, re-harmonization, restructuring, re-texturing, decomposition, atomisation, retrograde, layering, heavy filtration, ring modulation, superposition, vocoding, retuning and many others.... And what's important for such use - original material must still be recognizable, otherwise it's senseless and better to use your own material. I composed more such variations, but authors can't protest, they are dead few hundred years :-)

And as for the law, there's a simple rule: I suppose you need an approval from author (if living) or from his heirs (70 or 50 years after his death, differs by countries) when you want to use his material. There was some rule concerning allowed length in bars which could be used without approval, some time ago, but I'm not sure if it's still valid, as sometimes three notes melodic cell or motif, or some typical rhythm, or even one second sound, sample or sound effect is recognizable. Here it depends on internal structure of music, style, and context, and in the case of prosecution it will be judged by experts. Theoretically you can have problem even with one short, very typical sound sample or sound effect.

But this is interesting field. For example what if somebody uses a famous 12tone row used before and make from it totally new original composition? Or what about some very typical timbre, or combination of instruments used before? Or some rough formal idea, like those which Ives used in The Unanswered Question, Ravel in Bolero or Cage in 4'33"? But I suppose no artist with some brain will want to use such idea again....

On 6 Feb 2010, at 7:47 PM, Sarn Ursell wrote:

>
>
> I have some questions for you microtuners.
>
> I do know that laws differ from country to country as to copyright > rules and regulations, but what I need to know is what the rules > are for DRASTICALLY altering someone else's composition by > mangleing and microtuneing it.
>
> In SCALA, you see, I played around with the retune MIDI file > feature as explained to my by Mr.Warren Burt, with other's 12ET > MIDI files which I had mangled severly, and in some cases, I had > even gone as far as to mangle the resultant *.wavs.
>
> Look, a QALITIVE analysis as done by a panel of "experts", might > have these "experts" rate the similarity of two peices, a mangled > and derived microtonal peice as to compared with the origional 12ET > peice, on a scale of 1 to 1000, with 1000 being EXACTLY the same, 0 > being TOTALLY different and 500 being somewhat similar.
>
> This is quite easily done and it is pretty straightfoward, but it > IS subject to personal interpretation and opinion.

I don't think. Experts can judge such structural things exactly and objectively. I mean even heavily detuned Alla Turca March from Mozart is still recognizable by it's musical structure (rhythm, texture, voicing, form, expression, articulation, ornamentation...). You can compress or expand intervals, you can retune individual notes, you can mirror intervals or rhythm, combine mirrored pitches with retrograde rhythm of the piece, but you can't change the basic character of music. Just distorted Mozart. There will be always similarity.

>
> However, what is really, REALLY diffilult, and impractical is a > logical, QUANTITIVE formal, rigorous, logical, algorithmic set of > rules for derermineing the similarity of two peices, between the > origional and the mangled-and-microtuned.
>
> Can you please suggest ideas as to how this might be done?
>
> I do not want to break any laws and to get into trouble by > distributeing material which breaks copyright laws in whatever > country, as it is not fair on the origional artist, and it is also > illegal.

Not if you will get approval. Or compose your own material.

>
> I thought the you could take all the samples of each, and analyse > them by percentage of 0's, 1's, 00's, 01's, 10's, 11's, and then by > tripels (0/1)*3 (8 configurations), (0/1)*4 (16 configurations)....> (0/1)*n (2^n configurations).
>
> This is impractical to do, as the amount of percentages > calculations generated would be VAST, but assumedly each song when > treated this was would have it's own signature of proportion 0's > and 1's configuration content.

I don't understand well what you mean, statistical analysis of consecutive intervals by Markov chains? Yes, it was used in musicology to find percentage of identity/similarity, but we humans with some musical knowledge can judge music diferent and more easy and quick way, from the semantic context - let's leave 0's and 1's to stupid computers. We can use common sense and higher level of musical language.

>
> So, please tell me, how different does a mangled and microtuned > peice have to be?
>
> What you have to realize is that microtonal music is obsecure, and > I do not know if there are even any laws which govern what I have > experimented with.
>
> What can you all tell me about what you know about rules for > copyright with derived works?
>
> ---Sarn.

Daniel Forro

________________________________

Daniel Says: Just a small question: is there any special reason why you want to

use material of somebody else and not to compose your own from zero?

Sarn says: No, there was no special reason in particular.

I had never, ever intended to plagerize, steal or to break copyright by copying or deriveing my own songs, and compositions from other peoples work's, -the reason which I had taken *.mid files and mangled and microtuned them was merely as an intellectual exercise, -an experiment if you will.

If I find that I am breaking copyright by doing this, then I will not distribute material to others, on the alternative tuning list or otherwise.

Daniel says:You can use all that derivative effort on your own material. In my
opinion it's more easy to make new piece than try to derive something
from the finished one.

Sarn says:Well, it really all depends on how you go about it, I have done my own origional stuff, also.

The best analogy that I could make to what I did would be like taking several sentences from several books at random, and then using a thesarus to changed some of the words, spell some words backwards, and permutate some of the words, to then use these mangled sentences for every 3rd line of some poetry which I have done.

It is kind of like this.

Daniel says:There could be only few artistic reasons and ways how to use foreign
material: quotation, collage, traditional variation or some kind or
structural processing of musical or audio elements - rearranging, re-
instrumentation, re-voicing, re-harmonization, restructuring, re-
texturing, decomposition, atomisation, retrograde, layering, heavy
filtration, ring modulation, superposition, vocoding, retuning and
many others.... And what's important for such use - original material
must still be recognizable,

Sarn says:Yes, but you wouldn't want to make it too similar to the origional, else you may be breaking the law.

I beileve that the rules state that you can use up to 12 sucessive notes before you break copyright rules, but, hey, that is for 12ET, and I do not know what the rules are for 12ET mapped in one-to-one correspondence to another Et, say 19ET.

Or what about 24ET, or 123ET?

I mean, is it just degrees of similarity?

(Thus 12ET--->13ET may be defined by law to be more similar than 12ET--->17ET).

Sampling has us not use more than 30 seconds unmanipulated samples

Any more, and then we are breaking the rules.

As for chord progressions I believe that you can do pretty much anything.

Daniel says:otherwise it's senseless and better to
use your own material.

Sarn says:Well, it all depends on how you look at it.

My expeiments were just that, -experiments, but I just want to keep it all legal.

Daniel says:I composed more such variations, but authors
can't protest, they are dead few hundred years :-)

And as for the law, there's a simple rule: I suppose you need an
approval from author (if living) or from his heirs (70 or 50 years
after his death, differs by countries) when you want to use his
material.

Sarn says:OK.

I talked to a lawyer at the gym who claims that it is all based on percentage and degrees of similarity, but it is just that I do not know what the percentage is.

Daniel says:There was some rule concerning allowed length in bars which
could be used without approval, some time ago, but I'm not sure if
it's still valid, as sometimes three notes melodic cell or motif, or
some typical rhythm, or even one second sound, sample or sound effect
is recognizable. Here it depends on internal structure of music,
style, and context, and in the case of prosecution it will be judged
by experts. Theoretically you can have problem even with one short,
very typical sound sample or sound effect.

But this is interesting field.

Sarn says:Yes very interesting.

Danile says:For example what if somebody uses a
famous 12tone row used before and make from it totally new original
composition? Or what about some very typical timbre, or combination
of instruments used before? Or some rough formal idea, like those
which Ives used in The Unanswered Question, Ravel in Bolero or Cage
in 4'33"? But I suppose no artist with some brain will want to use
such idea again....

I don't think. Experts can judge such structural things exactly and
objectively.

Sarn says:Yes, but a lot of the time this is based on PERSONAL OPINION.

What is needed is a quantituve method, and this may be centurarys away with some vast future form of artificial intelligence, or a quantum computer, or something.

Daniel says:I mean even heavily detuned Alla Turca March from Mozart
is still recognizable by it's musical structure (rhythm, texture,
voicing, form, expression, articulation, ornamentation. ..). You can
compress or expand intervals, you can retune individual notes, you
can mirror intervals or rhythm, combine mirrored pitches with
retrograde rhythm of the piece, but you can't change the basic
character of music. Just distorted Mozart. There will be always
similarity.

Sarn says:That is amazing, I mean is there some deeper reason for why distorted Mozart will always sound like Mozart?

And, is this also true for other composers, Brahms, Bach, even Jean Michael Jarre or Ivor Darreg?

I have read in one of CLifford A Pickover's books that humans find it nearly impossible NOT to create patterns when tapping out 0's and 1's on a computer and when these strings of 0's and 1's are analyzed by singles pairs triples quadrulples...n-uples for their contant of 2^n configurations hyumans nearly always make a bias to some form of pattern.

Both amazing and interesting.

Danile says:Not if you will get approval. Or compose your own material.

Sarn says:I am working on it, but if I cannot, then I will not break the law.

Daniel says:I don't understand well what you mean, statistical analysis of
consecutive intervals by Markov chains? Yes, it was used in
musicology to find percentage of identity/similarity , but we humans
with some musical knowledge can judge music diferent and more easy
and quick way, from the semantic context - let's leave 0's and 1's to
stupid computers. We can use common sense and higher level of musical
language.

Sarn says:More kind of like a statistical analysis of content and proportion 1's and 0's and proportion of groups of 1's and 0's to find the content of the music.

Each song should have it's own signature of proportion of 1 and 0 groups.

This may be a good quantative method of finding similarity between songs, but the amount of information generated when doing this is HUGE, (more than there are particles in the Universe...).

I'll explain more in depth in a later post to the alternative tuning list.

----Sarn.

__________________________________________________________________________________
Yahoo!7: Catch-up on your favourite Channel 7 TV shows easily, legally, and for free at PLUS7. www.tv.yahoo.com.au/plus7

why guess?

see the following on fair use (assuming you are in USA)

http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-fairuse.html

http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html

Of course if you transcribe scores from music >100 years old you'll probably
be ok.

On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 6:28 AM, Sarn Ursell <polyverse2002@...>wrote:

>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
> **
> Daniel Says: Just a small question: is there any special reason why you
> want to
>
> use material of somebody else and not to compose your own from zero?
>
>
> Sarn says: No, there was no special reason in particular.
>
>
> I
>

The more important question is, who cares?

http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html

Section 107 contains a list of the various purposes for which the
reproduction of a particular work may be considered fair, such as criticism,
comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Section 107
also sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a
particular use is fair:

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of
commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
2. The nature of the copyrighted work
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to
the copyrighted work as a whole
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of,
the copyrighted work

The distinction between fair use and infringement may be unclear and not
easily defined. There is no specific number of words, lines, or notes that
may safely be taken without permission.

I would say that retuning a piece of music to some novel system is very
clearly a nonprofit educational purpose. Furthermore -- whose works are you
afraid of retuning out of fear that they're going to go after you? Note the
huge repositories of MIDI files out there that already exist, I don't think
they've been subject to much legal action.

If you find a MIDI of some song and retune it - I would be surprised if they
went after you and not the original MIDI file author. And if they do,
they'll send you a cease and desist or a DMCA notice, and you just remove
it.

The whole thing is caught up in some legal gray area.
-Mike

On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 6:28 AM, Sarn Ursell <polyverse2002@...>wrote:

>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
> **
> Daniel Says: Just a small question: is there any special reason why you
> want to
>
> use material of somebody else and not to compose your own from zero?
>
>
> Sarn says: No, there was no special reason in particular.
>
>
> I had never, ever intended to plagerize, steal or to break copyright by
> copying or deriveing my own songs, and compositions from other peoples
> work's, -the reason which I had taken *.mid files and mangled and microtuned
> them was merely as an intellectual exercise, -an experiment if you will.
>
>
> If I find that I am breaking copyright by doing this, then I will not
> distribute material to others, on the alternative tuning list or otherwise.
>
>
> Daniel says:You can use all that derivative effort on your own material. In
> my
> opinion it's more easy to make new piece than try to derive something
> from the finished one.
>
>
> Sarn says:Well, it really all depends on how you go about it, I have done
> my own origional stuff, also.
>
>
> The best analogy that I could make to what I did would be like taking
> several sentences from several books at random, and then using a thesarus to
> changed some of the words, spell some words backwards, and permutate some of
> the words, to then use these mangled sentences for every 3rd line of some
> poetry which I have done.
>
>
> It is kind of like this.
>
>
> Daniel says:There could be only few artistic reasons and ways how to use
> foreign
> material: quotation, collage, traditional variation or some kind or
> structural processing of musical or audio elements - rearranging, re-
> instrumentation, re-voicing, re-harmonization, restructuring, re-
> texturing, decomposition, atomisation, retrograde, layering, heavy
> filtration, ring modulation, superposition, vocoding, retuning and
> many others.... And what's important for such use - original material
> must still be recognizable,
>
>
> Sarn says:Yes, but you wouldn't want to make it too similar to the
> origional, else you may be breaking the law.
>
>
> I beileve that the rules state that you can use up to 12 sucessive notes
> before you break copyright rules, but, hey, that is for 12ET, and I do not
> know what the rules are for 12ET mapped in one-to-one correspondence to
> another Et, say 19ET.
>
>
> Or what about 24ET, or 123ET?
>
>
> I mean, is it just degrees of similarity?
>
>
> (Thus 12ET--->13ET may be defined by law to be more similar than
> 12ET--->17ET).
>
>
> Sampling has us not use more than 30 seconds unmanipulated samples
>
>
> Any more, and then we are breaking the rules.
>
>
> As for chord progressions I believe that you can do pretty much anything.
>
>
> Daniel says:otherwise it's senseless and better to
> use your own material.
>
>
> Sarn says:Well, it all depends on how you look at it.
>
>
> My expeiments were just that, -experiments, but I just want to keep it all
> legal.
>
>
> Daniel says:I composed more such variations, but authors
> can't protest, they are dead few hundred years :-)
>
> And as for the law, there's a simple rule: I suppose you need an
> approval from author (if living) or from his heirs (70 or 50 years
> after his death, differs by countries) when you want to use his
> material.
>
>
> Sarn says:OK.
>
>
> I talked to a lawyer at the gym who claims that it is all based on
> percentage and degrees of similarity, but it is just that I do not know what
> the percentage is.
>
>
> Daniel says:There was some rule concerning allowed length in bars which
> could be used without approval, some time ago, but I'm not sure if
> it's still valid, as sometimes three notes melodic cell or motif, or
> some typical rhythm, or even one second sound, sample or sound effect
> is recognizable. Here it depends on internal structure of music,
> style, and context, and in the case of prosecution it will be judged
> by experts. Theoretically you can have problem even with one short,
> very typical sound sample or sound effect.
>
> But this is interesting field.
>
>
> Sarn says:Yes very interesting.
>
>
> Danile says:For example what if somebody uses a
> famous 12tone row used before and make from it totally new original
> composition? Or what about some very typical timbre, or combination
> of instruments used before? Or some rough formal idea, like those
> which Ives used in The Unanswered Question, Ravel in Bolero or Cage
> in 4'33"? But I suppose no artist with some brain will want to use
> such idea again....
>
> I don't think. Experts can judge such structural things exactly and
> objectively.
>
>
> Sarn says:Yes, but a lot of the time this is based on PERSONAL OPINION.
>
>
> What is needed is a quantituve method, and this may be centurarys away with
> some vast future form of artificial intelligence, or a quantum computer, or
> something.
>
>
> Daniel says:I mean even heavily detuned Alla Turca March from Mozart
> is still recognizable by it's musical structure (rhythm, texture,
> voicing, form, expression, articulation, ornamentation. ..). You can
> compress or expand intervals, you can retune individual notes, you
> can mirror intervals or rhythm, combine mirrored pitches with
> retrograde rhythm of the piece, but you can't change the basic
> character of music. Just distorted Mozart. There will be always
> similarity.
>
>
> Sarn says:That is amazing, I mean is there some deeper reason for why
> distorted Mozart will always sound like Mozart?
>
>
> And, is this also true for other composers, Brahms, Bach, even Jean Michael
> Jarre or Ivor Darreg?
>
>
> I have read in one of CLifford A Pickover's books that humans find it
> nearly impossible NOT to create patterns when tapping out 0's and 1's on a
> computer and when these strings of 0's and 1's are analyzed by singles pairs
> triples quadrulples...n-uples for their contant of 2^n configurations
> hyumans nearly always make a bias to some form of pattern.
>
>
> Both amazing and interesting.
>
>
> Danile says:Not if you will get approval. Or compose your own material.
>
>
> Sarn says:I am working on it, but if I cannot, then I will not break the
> law.
>
> Daniel says:I don't understand well what you mean, statistical analysis of
> consecutive intervals by Markov chains? Yes, it was used in
> musicology to find percentage of identity/similarity , but we humans
> with some musical knowledge can judge music diferent and more easy
> and quick way, from the semantic context - let's leave 0's and 1's to
> stupid computers. We can use common sense and higher level of musical
> language.
>
>
> Sarn says:More kind of like a statistical analysis of content and
> proportion 1's and 0's and proportion of groups of 1's and 0's to find the
> content of the music.
>
>
> Each song should have it's own signature of proportion of 1 and 0 groups.
>
>
> This may be a good quantative method of finding similarity between songs,
> but the amount of information generated when doing this is HUGE, (more than
> there are particles in the Universe...).
>
>
> ------------------------------
> Yahoo!7: Catch-up on your favourite Channel 7 TV shows easily, legally, and
> for free at PLUS7. Check it out<http://au.rd.yahoo.com/tv/catchup/tagline/*http://au.tv.yahoo.com/plus7/?cmp=mailtag>.
>
>
>